Susannah Hart

Biography


Susannah’s poems have been widely published in magazines and online, including Smiths Knoll, Magma, The North, The Rialto and Poetry London. Her debut collection Out of True won the Live Canon First Collection Prize in 2018 and her poem Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy was the winner of the 2019 National Poetry Competition. Susannah is on the board of Magma Poetry, works as a freelance copywriter and is a long-serving governor at her local primary school. She lives in London with her husband and two sons. 

 


The Poem 



Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy

 

has left me feeling vaguely sick and I think a walk

is probably the answer, is often said to be the answer,

though I now understand physical intervention must

not be undertaken lightly and the appropriate training

must be given because the policy is designed to prevent

the impairment of health or development even though it has had

the opposite effect on me as currently I feel impaired, uneven,

unequal to the task of being real, such that it occurs to me

that humankind seems to be trying to find ever more

ingenious ways to make the bearing of reality more difficult,

else how could anyone have thought of all the horrible

things that someone somewhere is always doing

to someone else, whose vulnerabilities may or may not

include neglect, homelessness, mental health issues,

bereavement, previous abuse, but then again humankind

has form for this kind of thing as medieval warfare

I seem to recall was rather brutal and the skeletons exhumed

from mass battle graves show hacking injuries, great gouges

in the bones from mace and broadsword, and to be fair

that documentary on Vietnam that we’re watching

on Catch Up may not go heavy on the suffering caused

by female genital mutilation or child sexual exploitation

but it’s pretty full on when it comes to napalm and furthermore

the museum in Hiroshima strongly implied that the devil

has always had his hands full with party tricks and pranks

which leads me to ask myself whether any good will come

of all this knowledge as in point of fact the policy suggests

that the imagery should only be viewed on a strictly necessary

and need to know basis and certainly I did not need to know

about the buttons burned into the skin or the flesh hanging off

the wrists but now I do know and I cannot cease to know  

while perhaps more usefully I also know what to do if a child

discloses and I recognise that this takes a lot of courage

and that I cannot stop paying attention because beforehand

the child may show signs of anger, sadness, bruising, silence,

they may wear long sleeves at inappropriate times, their lives

may be particularly vulnerable, more transient, chaotic

and unsupported than lives in general, and they may feel

guilty, scared and as if they have lost all trust in adults

and indeed when you think about it who could blame them.

 

Listen

Gaynor ClementsComment